Archive | February, 2012

Scrivener Software Review & Computer Back-Ups

February 29, 2012

12 Comments

I’ve been experimenting with a piece of software for writers called “Scrivener“.  It’s got a number of advantages over Microsoft Word for writing a book and I think it will make my process less frustrating.  At the bottom I also have a brief discussion about backing up your hard drive. There are several things I […]

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Thoughts On Using Prompts

February 29, 2012

7 Comments

Ollin Morales, over at Courage 2 Create, has a great blog for writer’s and creative people.  He recently had a post in which he explained why he doesn’t think writer’s should use prompts.  It’s worth checking out.  To sum up, his reasons are: It only works because it’s acting as a mirror to what is […]

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Changing E-Mail Addresses

February 24, 2012

16 Comments

When I changed my E-mail account, WordPress began sending me duplicate E-mails of my subscriptions as well as duplicates of some comments.  This did not help my desire to simplify my life by getting all my blog activity into an E-mail account separate from my regular E-mails (you can throw in a few expletives at […]

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HTML Paragraph Breaks

February 23, 2012

4 Comments

From time to time I cannot get my lines to double space correctly in WordPress.  It sometimes happens around quotes or around the photographs.  When I did the post on embedding YouTube links, everything got really scrunched together. WordPress does not like blank lines.  If you try spacing down to create blanks, it will remove […]

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30-Day Spirituality Challenge

February 21, 2012

7 Comments

Today’s guest post is from Judith at the blog, Diabetic Redemption.  When I left a note at how impressed I was with the questions, she laughed and said “. . .unpaid student loans owed to a seminary that no longer exists at least taught me what questions to ask!” At the bottom, she does qualify […]

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Book Review: A Writer’s Book of Days

February 20, 2012

6 Comments

Today’s guest post is by Chris Donner at Chris Donner, Mystery Writer.   One of the really great things about Chris’s blog is that along the left side she has chapters to her mystery book that is in progress. A few weeks ago, Chris did a review of “A Writer’s Book of Days: A Spirited Companion […]

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Embedding a YouTube Video

February 17, 2012

2 Comments

Embedding a YouTube video into your blog isn’t difficult to do, but I find the instructions from the WordPress support forum to be difficult to follow.  It’s really not that hard.  There are two ways to do it: Using the “upload / insert”, choose “from URL”.  Then choose “Audio, Video, or Other File” and copy […]

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Book Review: Tell Your Time

February 16, 2012

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One of the perpetual struggles for bloggers, writers, parents, spouses, and everyone else is finding enough time.  Amy Lynn Andrews, from Blogging With Amy, has solid ideas and techniques in her book, Tell Your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free.  The book only has 30 pages, making it a fast […]

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Making Time To Do It

February 14, 2012

6 Comments

One of the frustrating things about blogging, doing a daily challenge, or any other kind of a hobby is finding the time to do it.  For me, an additional problem is not be miserably tired so I can actually enjoy the process of doing something creative. The author, Iris Murdoch, once said: But for most of […]

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Prompts To Share Your World

February 13, 2012

11 Comments

Today’s guest blogger is Cee Neuner, who posts over at Cee’s Life Photography Blog.  Cee coordinates a fun projected called, “Share Your World“, as a way for bloggers to get to know each other better.  I’ll let Cee describe it herself: About Share Your World I discovered Jesse Jaca’s blog and saw they had a Getting to […]

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Book Review: The Professor and the Madman

February 10, 2012

5 Comments

Today’s guest post is reposted from JudithB at I choose how I will spend the rest of my life.  Although this isn’t the type of information I usually seek for this blog, I found her review of this book to be fascinating about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary.  Since words are near and dear to the […]

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Comment Moderation & Pingbacks

February 9, 2012

12 Comments

Comment moderation is a way to prevent spam in your comments, as well as stop trolls who want to leave off-topic inflammatory comments. Pingbacks are a way of tracking when someone has linked to one of your posts, reblogged it, or when you have created a link to one of your own posts.  It’s also a way […]

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The Simple Woman’s Daybook

February 7, 2012

4 Comments

Peggy Hostetler, author of the blog The Simple Woman, has a powerful set of questions to help diarists and bloggers record their life at the present moment in time.  You consider things such as what you are doing, thinking and wearing.  It asks about your plans for the rest of the week and invites you to […]

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Taking a Field Trip

February 6, 2012

11 Comments

When I did my daily photo challenge in 2011, I read a piece of advice that said to take field trips for the purpose of looking for photos. I was pleasantly surprised to see how this helped my blog writing as well for the same reasons as it helped my photography – it gave me something to […]

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Stop Following A Comment

February 1, 2012

11 Comments

I enjoy leaving comments, seeing the comments of others, and the replies from the blogger.  Sometimes though, it becomes more than I expected.  Instead of petering out after several days, the comments go on and on, and I’m no longer interested in my mail box filling up with them. It’s possible to stop following a […]

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No Comfort Zone Challenge

February 1, 2012

8 Comments

One of the more unusual challenges in 2012 is that of the “no comfort zone” by Marge Katherine at the Inside Out Cafe.  Marge encourages her readers and fellow bloggers to every week take a step outside of their comfort zone and do something different. I very much enjoyed reading Marge’s posts on this, from her […]

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